THE KAMUNING ESSAYS

WAR AND REMEMBRANCE
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, ManilaStandardToday
April 13, 2005

What are we to do when evil doesn't befall us, the late writer Susan Sontag once asked - when the pain that is endured is the pain of others? Rarely can questions be as difficult - or vital. Computers are useless, said Pablo Picasso. They can only give us answers.

"Why is evil not everywhere?" asked Sontag. "More precisely, why is it somewhere but not everywhere?" Because some choose to remember and some don't? [1]

This year is the anniversary of many things. It has been decades since the last world war. Which occasions are we to commemorate? What shall we remember to forget? A just war? Just war? Liberation? The end of evil? The alleged end of evil?

Between 1929 and 1940, the period that saw the Nazi machine increase in size, influence and aggression, American investments in Germany "accelerated by more than 48 percent " while dropping "everywhere else in Europe."

During the war, with American government support, US companies continued to operate in Germany involving firms which used concentration camp slave labor. In fact, while US bombs hurled death at the fascist horde, "American pilots were given instructions not to hit factories in Germany that were owned by US firms. As a result, German civilians began using the Ford plant in Cologne as an air raid shelter."[2]

After the war, the same moral force: it is "a matter of record that the Pentagon did, in the late 1940s, hire two Nazi doctors to lecture and conduct research at the Air Force School of Medicine in Texas."

Lecture on what, you might ask? Why, on technology transfer, of course. According to the scholar Daniel Barenblatt, the two men employed by the US government, "Dr. Kurt Blome and Major General Walter Schreiber, had conducted death camp experiments in which prisoners were killed by plague, typhus, and tuberculosis infection, according to evidence presented at the Nuremberg trial."[3] Nice teaching syllabus.

The row of over Japanese textbooks is not an internal affair of Japan, but a question affecting the "justice and conscience of mankind," said Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Qin Gang recently. The Chinese official was criticizing the Japanese government's renewed encouragement of schoolbooks that glossed over Japan's wartime atrocities.

"We solemnly require the Japanese government to take concrete deeds to honor its commitment to reflect on its history of aggression," said Gang, who was merely prescribing a cure.[4] Forgetting is like gangrene - it eats away at the moral fiber that attaches the mind with the heart:

"The [Japanese] publishers' initial decision to include references to the 'comfort women' in their history textbooks in those days largely reflected the widespread mistaken perception about so-called comfort women," crowed the editorial of the Japanese paper, the Daily Yomiuri. "It was believed both at home and abroad that those women had been transported for sexual servitude," the editorial continued. "However, the perception has been proved wrong. Given this, publishers had a good reason to remove references to 'comfort women' from their textbooks." [5]

Instead of the "masochistic" view of national history, hissed neo-fascist Japanese organizations led by the Association for New History Textbooks (Tsukurukai), what must be propagated is "a 'proud' view of a pure, honourable Japanese history" - one where comfort women are classified as "greedy prostitutes."[6]

Is it possible to prostitute memory?

Of punishments and perfidies, the Philippine province of Pampanga was thought to have had its fill - the volcanic tantrum of Mt. Pinatubo comes to mind along with the protracted presence of one of America's largest overseas military bases. But sometimes there is always room for more of the same.

In a town of the province called Mabalacat, the statue of an imperial Japanese pilot stands on a pedestal of stones stacked like a pyramid in the middle of a garden ornamented with newly manicured grass, flowers and open sky. The statue is relaxed as he peers, hand on hip, at the red Japanese arch marking the garden's entrance and the mountains in the horizon. The figure is that of a Kamikaze pilot, and the square of earth on which the stolid pilot stands is the Kamikaze Shrine, a memorial to the suicidal human instrument of Japan's war made possible by Japanese money and the support of the town's government.

The Mabalacat Tourism Office calls the shrine a "Peace Memorial" and says that the memorial is "not for the glorification of the Kamikaze but rather for the use of war history as a tool for the promotion of peace." However, there is no explanation regarding Japanese imperial ambition, which hurled the region into chaos, or about the catastrophic consequences of Japan's hideous war. There are instead sentences almost gleefully talking of Japanese Zero-type fighter planes successfully blowing up US aircraft carriers and of the "first successful Kamikaze mission" witnessed by "Hiroshi Nishizawa, Japan's greatest ace pilot with 103 kills confirmed."

Like an obscure American town staking its claim to fame through billboards boasting "Home of World's Biggest Potato," the entrance to the Kamikaze memorial heralds - in capitalized letters and supplied with an exclamation point - the curious Disneyland-like distinction of a Lt. Yukio Seki described as "THE WORLD'S FIRST OFFICIAL HUMAN BOMB!"

Those who purchase incense sticks and candles in the shrine are given brochures in Japanese showing the photograph of Mabalacat Tourism Office head Guy "Indra" Hilbero dressed like a Kamikaze pilot, whose uniform somehow resembles the explosive-sutured dress of today's suicide bombers. In place of the grim bearing of the suicidal militant, Hilbero stands, hands on hips, beaming and grinning like a kid.[7]

In his mind, a vacuum. In his chest, a void.

THE BLOOD THAT BINDS
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, ManilaStandardToday/abs-cbnNEWS.com
March 30, 2005

Black is the blood of pipelines, the preferred shade of Washington's flammable mural called the Middle East - an oil painting that combines the high art of irony with the science of spontaneous combustion.[1]

Trace the blood and connect the dots.[2]

Pale memory, full of grace, the Lord is with you.

"I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight," confessed the corpulent US president William McKinley in 1898. Long tired of a pesky prickle, the United States decides it's time to scratch the itch: America covets new territories. America annexes the Philippines. What a relief.

"I went down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance. One night it came to me. First, we could not give [the Philippines] back to Spain - that would be cowardly and dishonorable; second . . . we could not turn them over to France or Germany - that would be bad for business; and third, we could not leave them to themselves - they were unfit for self-government . . . There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all . . . and uplift and civilize and Christianize them . . . And then I went to bed, and went to sleep and slept soundly."

The god of empire grants McKinley's wish - for god is empire and empire is god. Less than a decade after McKinley's entreaty, America's benevolent rule sends hundreds of thousands of Filipinos towards Jesus and the afterlife.

Blessed is the imperialist among he-men and blessed is the vile fruit of his genius.

America's annexation of the Philippines contains many firsts. Many say it was America's first imperial adventure. Certainly it was Asia's first republic that the US slew.[3] It was also "the first time Black troops were ordered to fight a colonial war in Southeast Asia."

Niggers versus Negroes. Brilliant.

From 1899 to 1902, "an estimated two thousand Black women, men, and children" die from racial attacks in America's deep South. From 1899 to 1901 - a mere three years after US troops began firing on Filipino revolutionaries - an American general estimates the death toll of Filipinos at the hands of their US liberators to number well over half a million.[4]

"To the colored American soldier," implored a public communique issued in the Philippines on November 17, 1899 and penned, some say, by the crippled colored Filipino revolutionist himself, Apolinario Mabini, "It is without honor that you shed your precious blood. Your masters have thrown you in the most iniquitous fight with double purpose - to make you the instrument of their ambition, and also your hard work will make the extinction of your race."

Fight for the flag! Under what colors? One African-American resolves his moral impasse. David Fagen, colored beacon, bless his soul - Fagen leads twenty other Blacks who desert the US Army. Many join Fagen and enlist with the Filipino guerillas, an act "unprecedented in Black military history."

"I fear that the future of the Filipino is that of the Negro in the South," wrote US Gunnery Sergeant John Galloway, a soldier-journalist who wrote down in his journal the sentiments of Filipino civilians regarding independence and their relations with Black and white troops. A short period later, Galloway joins the ranks of the Filipino resistance.[5]

One fate. One blood.

When America entered the Second World War, the great nation called on its people to close ranks under the star-spangled banner. The war accepted Blacks, wrote Eduardo Galeano, "thousands and thousands of them, but not the Red Cross."[6]

Just before the US joined World War II, Charles Richard Drew made a historic discovery. While conducting research at the Columbia Medical School in New York, Doctor Drew discovers that when red blood cells are removed from whole blood, "the remaining fluid - plasma - could be stored un-refrigerated for many months."[7]

As the first director of the American Red Cross Blood Bank, Drew ensures that shipments of liquid plasma are sent to combat zones where Axis bombs and bullets are spreading death. Thanks to Dr. Drew, who has made it possible to save blood, "plasma banks are reviving thousands of dying men on the battlefields of Europe."

At first, the Red Cross and the US military refuse the blood of Blacks in the plasma banks, "so as to avoid the possibility that races might mix by transfusion." But later they relent - provided Negro blood is separated from blood from Caucasians. Charles Drew resigns. Charles Drew is black.

What flows in your veins?

In a rousing speech delivered in 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. denounces the American invasion of Vietnam. The Black leader speaks "with heart-rending eloquence about the cruel irony of the TV images of black and white boys burning the huts of a poor village in brutal solidarity, killing and dying together for a nation that wouldn't even seat them together at the same tables."[8]

Are we talking of today?

The Reverend's words cut like a knife. He is accused of treason. He is condemned by "former allies and attacked viciously by the American press." [9] Red, white and blue; stars over you. Georgie said, Condi said, I love you.



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